Friday, November 25, 2005
The American Way
"Four years ago, President George W. Bush quietly assumed dictatorial powers with a secret executive order granting himself the right to imprison anyone on earth indefinitely, without charges or trial or indictment or evidence...This week, the U.S. Senate voted to codify the core of this global autocracy under the pretense of curtailing it....
But what can we actually see from this lofty moral promontory? We see that all foreign captives in Bush's worldwide gulag have now been stripped of the ancient human right of habeas corpus. They will not be allowed to challenge "any aspect of their detention" in court -- until they have already been tried and convicted by a "military tribunal" constituted under rules concocted arbitrarily by Bush and his minions. Only then, after years of incarceration without rights or legal protection, will they be given access to a single federal appeals court that can review their conviction -- subject to the usual "national security" restrictions on challenging evidence gathered by secret means from secret sources in secret places.
Remarkably, the Supreme Court is expressly prohibited from any jurisdiction whatsoever over any aspect of gulag captivity, The Washington Post reports. And of course, Bush can simply skip the tribunal and keep anyone he pleases chained in legal limbo until they rot. Neither of the ballyhooed amendments affects this raw despotism.
Meanwhile, U.S. citizens can also be arbitrarily imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial. ... Bush officials present the judge with a piece of paper declaring that the prisoner is one bad hombre, but all the evidence against him is classified and nobody can see it ... And that's it. The captive is then plunged back into the gulag, to be disposed of according to Bush's whim.
So the compromise of allowing a post-conviction appeal -- for people who have been arbitrarily seized and held in isolation for years without charges, who have often been tortured, humiliated and driven to madness or attempted suicide before facing a kangaroo court -- was hastily cobbled together and presented to the world as a triumph of the human spirit and the American way."
--from http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11061.htm
But what can we actually see from this lofty moral promontory? We see that all foreign captives in Bush's worldwide gulag have now been stripped of the ancient human right of habeas corpus. They will not be allowed to challenge "any aspect of their detention" in court -- until they have already been tried and convicted by a "military tribunal" constituted under rules concocted arbitrarily by Bush and his minions. Only then, after years of incarceration without rights or legal protection, will they be given access to a single federal appeals court that can review their conviction -- subject to the usual "national security" restrictions on challenging evidence gathered by secret means from secret sources in secret places.
Remarkably, the Supreme Court is expressly prohibited from any jurisdiction whatsoever over any aspect of gulag captivity, The Washington Post reports. And of course, Bush can simply skip the tribunal and keep anyone he pleases chained in legal limbo until they rot. Neither of the ballyhooed amendments affects this raw despotism.
Meanwhile, U.S. citizens can also be arbitrarily imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial. ... Bush officials present the judge with a piece of paper declaring that the prisoner is one bad hombre, but all the evidence against him is classified and nobody can see it ... And that's it. The captive is then plunged back into the gulag, to be disposed of according to Bush's whim.
So the compromise of allowing a post-conviction appeal -- for people who have been arbitrarily seized and held in isolation for years without charges, who have often been tortured, humiliated and driven to madness or attempted suicide before facing a kangaroo court -- was hastily cobbled together and presented to the world as a triumph of the human spirit and the American way."
--from http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11061.htm
